Maybe this time things are happening a bit faster here.
It is certainly possible, even likely. Brazil has a population that is roughly 2/3rds that of the USA. HP would know what their sales are. After my last post I checked a little further and found that HP has service packs available in the USA as noted previously for up to 5 years. They are pretty spendy, but it would cost HP a lot more than the cost of the contract to break one.
Earlier this month I received a notification from HP saying they would not renew my extended maintenance plan, a plan they sold me and agreed a month earlier but haven´t billed me yet. At the time of the renewal the clearly stated that the PCL version would not be covered anymore, but as mine is a PS model they would still renew my contract, which now they are refusing to do.
In the service contracts I found for the USA, the Z3100 all models and the Z3200 all models are supported. You probably did this but I have to ask: - did you see if HP has contract part numbers listed for Brazil? I don’t mean a renewal contract, which may be a different HP part number. Of course HP could be dramatically reducing the availability of support for that entire continent. If their accountants show it isn’t worth their investment, they will understandably run away like a scared cat. I read somewhere that HP has been dropping a number of models throughout South America and your report is suggestive of that trend.
About the so called "B" version, I heard from an experienced technician that it is exactly the same, the only changes being the manufacturer brand and type of some internal parts, with no impact whatsoever on the printers behavior.
The experienced technician I spoke with stated the printer went through a redesign. There are indeed a number of different parts in the B series. But what you wrote in the paragraph above may also be correct. While the differing accounts we received may mean only that we shouldn’t take the word of experienced technicians for these things, I looked around for parts and indeed there are several different part numbers for the B series compared to the A series. To that end, one of the changes was for the power supply and another for the logic board. It may be the case that the B series printer went through a value engineering process. These are sometimes done to improve reliability and to lower cost to the manufacturer. As Ernst noted, the firmware employs different code. That said the performance specifications for the 2 models are similar.
